Innholdsfortegnelse for January 3-10, 2022 i The New Yorker

One June day in Romeoville, Illinois, a small town outside Chicago, an HBO crew ran into an unexpected obstacle: smoke billowing from a crematorium. The new series “Somebody Somewhere” was shooting at a funeral home, and the fumes had flustered a lighting guy. After a few takes, another combustive force entered the room. “No. 1 is here,” the assistant director announced. “Everybody be on your best behavior.” No. 1 on the call sheet was Bridget Everett, the forty-nine-year-old comedian, vocalist, and, as she likes to describe herself, “regionally recognized cabaret singer.” Everett is the star of “Somebody Somewhere,” which premières this month and is largely based on her life and her home town of Manhattan, Kansas. Everett is not known for staying on her best behavior, or even her better…

Dan Bongino, one of America’s most popular conservative commentators, lives in the seaside city of Stuart, Florida, less than an hour from Mar-a-Lago, where his friend Donald Trump bridles against a forced retirement. Every weekday from noon to three—the coveted time slot once held by the late Rush Limbaugh—“The Dan Bongino Show” goes live across the United States, beginning with an announcer’s voice over the sound of hard-rock guitars: “From the N.Y.P.D. to the Secret Service to behind the microphone, taking the fight to the radical left and the putrid swamp.” One day this fall, minutes before Bongino went on the air, he learned of an unfolding drama that offered prime material: in New York, a live interview with Vice-President Kamala Harris had been disrupted because two hosts of “The…

One by one as they burned out weTriaged the light bulbs to priority slots Around the house. The bedroom stillHeld a candle for us. The walls stayed Rented white. I can take almostAnything at this point. The waking Wince of morning, which is afternoon, whichIs like someone holding tightly your hand While you’re wearing a ring. The kitchen litigatesOur unreturned dishes. The birds have not yet Learned to mimic our phones, but coolly masterCar alarms & the dog’s longing. Baby, paradise Will be a house without linoleum floors, edgesPuckered up like an open carton of milk, Its origami lip. All I need to know isThe time of day & the names of The regulars. Not their names, but whatThey drank: old-fashioned, car bomb, purple rain, dirty Skyy. Showing up is…

On June 19, 1954, eleven boys from Oklahoma City boarded a bus bound for Robbers Cave State Park, about a hundred and fifty miles to the southeast. The boys had never met before, but all had just completed fifth grade and came from middle-income families. All were white and Protestant. When they reached the park, the boys were assigned to a cabin at an empty Boy Scout camp. They dubbed themselves the Rattlers. The following day, a second group of boys—also all white, Protestant, and middle class—arrived at the camp. They were assigned to a cabin that could not be seen from the first. They decided to call themselves the Eagles. For a week, the two groups went about their activities—swimming, tossing a baseball, sitting around a campfire—unaware of the…

The flute is the oldest of instruments, its recoverable history going back some forty thousand years. Prehistoric humans fashioned flutes, pipes, and whistles from the bones of birds and other animals. There is no way of knowing what this music sounded like or what purpose it served. Did it speak of love? Tribe? Nature? God? One unsettling bit of evidence is that the first known flutes were made from the remains of creatures that had been hunted and killed. Pascal Quignard, in his haunting book “The Hatred of Music,” summons a plausible scene: “The small packs of humans who hunted, painted, and modelled animal forms would hum short phrases, execute music with the help of birdcalls, resonators, and flutes made from marrowbones, and dance their secret stories while wearing masks…

WHAT IS A THOUGHT? James Somers’s piece about using brain imaging to read human thoughts paints a rosy picture of the potential of technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (“Head Space,” December 6th). Somers says that we’ve discovered what thoughts “really are: patterns of neural activation that correspond to points in meaning space.” But, of course, the mind-brain relationship is considerably more complex. Two mental states might be intrinsically identical, though one is a memory and the other is dreamed up. A thought-decoding device would have trouble distinguishing between the two. Revealingly, Somers compares the history of thought decoding to the breaking of the genetic code by James Watson and Francis Crick. But, in the past few decades, genetic research has shown that one cannot trust a reading of a…

Paulina, the gardener’s daughter, caresabout flowers doomed to die. If I bring her a bouquet, she frees itfrom the ribbons and gently places it in the hospice of a vase. When the flowers weaken, she trims their stemsand plucks off their wilting leaves. She takes the dead ones to the compost, from the restshe forms a new bouquet. Thus disappear in turn: poppies, anemones, carnations, damnations andforget-me-nots, until finally all that’s left are gypsophila and Judas’ pennies. Paulina,the gardener’s daughter, sees a bouquet in the vase even when it’s not there anymore. (Translated, from the Polish, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.)…

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a forest. It’s gone now (burned), and the four men walking in it are gone, too, which is what makes it far away. Neither it nor they exist anymore. But in June, 1965, the redwoods have a velvety, primeval look that brings to mind leprechauns or djinns or fairies. Three of the four men have never been in these ancient woods before, and to them the forest looks otherworldly, so removed is it from their everyday vistas of wives and children and offices. The oldest, Lou Kline, is only thirty-one, but all were born in the nineteen-thirties and raised without antibiotics, their military service completed before they went to college. Men of their generation got started on adulthood right away.…

Colorization, by Wil Haygood (Knopf). This chronicle of a century of Black filmmaking in a white-dominated industry begins in 1915, with a secret White House screening of “Birth of a Nation.” The film’s demonization of its Black characters, and the fact that those roles were played by white actors in blackface, foreshadows the iniquities that occupy much of Haygood’s account. Hollywood reduced Black experience to a handful of tropes, and Black artists were persistently denied recognition (the Oscar wins of Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier notwithstanding). The book’s most fascinating portions describe Black filmmakers’ attempts to bypass the mainstream—as in the pioneering career of Oscar Micheaux, a former Pullman porter and homesteader who made forty-four films from 1918 to 1948. The Irish Assassins, by Julie Kavanagh (Atlantic Monthly). A wrenching…

DECEMBER 29, 2021 – JANUARY 11, 2022 Shikō Munakata (1903-75) brought Japan’s woodblock tradition into the modern age with his spontaneous, Expressionist approach. “Shikō Munakata: A Way of Seeing,” on view at the Japan Society through March 20, includes the artist’s “Tōkaidō Series,” from 1964—“Yui: Construction at Sea,” pictured above, is among its sixty-one images—for which he travelled along the same coastal route that once inspired the Edo-period ukiyo-e masters Hiroshige and Hokusai. MUSIC Natu Camara AFRO-ROCK Around the turn of this century, Natu Camara began her music career in the Ideal Black Girls, a Guinean quartet considered West Africa’s first all-female R. & B. and hip-hop group. Since relocating to Harlem, the Ivory Coast-born singer has flipped her musical equation. Where before she was an African artist performing music…

When Joan Didion died, last Thursday, at eighty-seven, she left behind sixteen books, seven films, one play, and an impulse to make sense of what remained. It was tempting to note that, like her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, whose passing shaped “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), she died during the Christmas holiday. It was easy to see, as she did in her daughter’s lethal illness that same season, larger gears at work. Didion was a pattern-seeker—a writer with an uncanny ability to scan a text, a folder of clippings, or an entire society and, like a genius eying figures, find the markers pointing out how the whole worked. Through her efforts, the craft of journalism changed. She helped expand the landscape of what matters on the page.…

As far as I knew, North was the last of my former students to become an entrepreneur. By the time he finally started his business, in 2017, it had been twenty years since he sat in my classroom at Fuling Teachers College. The majority of his peers were now teachers who had as little as a decade left before they reached retirement age in China: sixty for men, fifty-five for women. In addition to the teachers, a handful of my former students had become government officials. During the nineteen-nineties, I taught English literature, and I sometimes asked students to act out scenes from Shakespeare. As we stayed in touch over the years, certain character roles continued to develop, like plays that never ended. One girl who had performed Juliet—wearing a…

It was on a train journey, from Richmond to Waterloo, that Virginia Woolf encountered the weeping woman. A pinched little thing, with her silent tears, she had no way of knowing that she was about to be enlisted into an argument about the fate of fiction. Woolf summoned her in the 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” writing that “all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite”—a character who awakens the imagination. Unless the English novel recalled that fact, Woolf thought, the form would be finished. Plot and originality count for crumbs if a writer cannot bring the unhappy lady to life. And here Woolf, almost helplessly, began to spin a story herself—the cottage that the old lady kept, decorated with sea urchins, her way of…

In March of 1995, Mitch Albom, a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press, was up late channel surfing when he saw a familiar face on the screen. Morris (Morrie) Schwartz, his Brandeis sociology professor, was suffering from A.L.S., and talking sagely on “Nightline” about his impending death. Albom, who had promised Schwartz that he would keep in touch but hadn’t written to him in sixteen years, saw this as a cosmic sign—or a journalistic opportunity—and visited Schwartz more than a dozen times in the next few months. He recorded their conversations about life and love, hoping to sell the transcript and pay off Schwartz’s medical bills, but he struggled to find a buyer, and Schwartz died a few weeks after Doubleday agreed to take the project. The rest is the…